This volume contains an array of essays that reflect, and reflect upon, the recent revival of scholarly interest in the self and consciousness. Various relevant issues are addressed in conceptually challenging ways, such as how consciousness and different forms of self-relevant experience develop in infancy and childhood and are related to the acquisition of skill; the role of the self in social development; the phenomenology of being conscious and its metapsychological implications; and the cultural foundations of conceptualizations of consciousness. Written by notable scholars in several areas of psychology, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and anthropology, the essays are of interest to readers from a variety of disciplines concerned with central, substantive questions in contemporary social science, and the humanities.

This volume brings together the primary challenges for 21st century cognitive sciences and cultural neuroscience in responding to the nature of human identity, self, and evolution of life itself. Through chapters devoted to intricate but focused models, empirical findings, theories, and experiential data, the contributors reflect upon the most exciting possibilities, and debate upon the fundamental aspects of consciousness and self in the context of cultural, philosophical, and multidisciplinary divergences and convergences. Such an understanding and the ensuing insights lie in the cusp of philosophy, neurosciences, psychiatry, and medical humanities. In this volume, the editors and contributors explore the foundations of human thinking and being and discuss both evolutionary/cultural embeddedness, and the self-orientation, of consciousness, keeping in mind questions that bring in the interdisciplinary complexity of issues such as the emergence of consciousness, relation between healing and agency, models of altered self, how cognition impacts the social self, experiential primacy as the hallmark of consciousness, and alternate epistemologies to understand these interdisciplinary puzzles.

Haney demonstrates that the debates in theory surrounding the questions of identity, truth, and language, which have so far eluded the mind or reason, cannot be resolved without recourse to the structure of consciousness and intersubjectivity - an interaction mediated by language and resulting in mutual agreement. Chapters four to eight apply the notion of intersubjectivity to the reading of specific works."--Jacket.

Emerson and Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also be seen as bitter rivals: America’s foremost literary statesman, protective of his reputation, and an ambitious and sometimes refractory protégé. The truth, Joel Porte maintains, is that Emerson and Thoreau were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired. In this book of essays, Porte focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers. He traces their individual achievements and their points of intersection, arguing that both men, starting from a shared belief in the importance of “self-culture,” produced a body of writing that helped move a decidedly provincial New England readership into the broader arena of international culture. It is a book that will appeal to all readers interested in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau.

Cohen establishes the importance of the self and argues that in order to appreciate the complexity of social formations, one must first take note of individuals awareness of themselves and as authors of social contexts and formations.

Rödl's thesis is that self-knowledge is not empirical; it does not spring from sensory affection. Rather, self-knowledge is knowledge from spontaneity; its object and its source are the subject's own activity, in the primary instance its acts of thinking, both theoretical and practical thinking, belief and action.

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticised as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness. Rather than rehashing intractable ontological debates on the mind-body relation, Shusterman reorients study of this crucial nexus towards a more fruitful, pragmatic direction that reinforces important but neglected connections between philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of everyday life.

Nishida Kitaro's reformulation of the major issues of Western philosophy from a Zen standpoint of "absolute nothingness" and "absolutely contradictory self-identity" represents the boldest speculative enterprise of modern Japan, continued today by his successors in the "Kyoto School" of philosophy. This English translation of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness evokes the movement and flavor of the original, clarifies its obscurities, and eliminates the repetitions. It sheds new light on the philosopher's career, revealing a long struggle with such thinkers as Cohen, Natorp, Husserl, Fichte, and Bergson, that ended with Nishida's break from the basic ontological assumptions of the West. Throughout labyrinthine arguments, Nishida never loses sight of his theme: the irreducibility and unobjectifiability of the act of self-consciousness which constitutes the self. Extensive annotation is provided for the first time in any edition of Nishida's work. Historians of Japanese philosophy and culture, and all those interested in the interaction of Eastern and Western thought-forms, now have a document which highlights many of the cultural, psychological, and intellectual dynamics that have shaped Japanese intellectual life in one of its most fascinating and ambitious manifestations.

This book presents in-depth conversations with hip-hop artists from around the world, representing the many regional scenes of the U.S. (from the East Coast to the Bay Area to the Dirty South), France, the Caribbean (from Jamaica to Puerto Rico), and Africa (from Algeria to Senegal), as well as diverse forms of street musics, such as Reggaeton, Reggae/Dancehall, Shaabi and Rai. Conversations with Jay-Z, Mos Def, Eve, Sean Paul, Young Jeezy, Foxy Brown, Booba, Buju Banton, Ivy Queen, Afrika Bambaataa, Sonia Sanchez, DJ Kool Herc, Oxmo Puccino, Trina, Cornbread, Mannie Fresh, Intik, Beanie Sigel, Cheb Khaled, Pitbull, Manu Key, Tego Calderon and many others, demonstrate these artists to be critical interpreters of their own culture and of the world around them. This book centers the usually marginalized voices of Hip Hop communities, presenting a remarkably refreshing and revealing view of Hip Hop Culture from the inside-out.

Challenges the widely held assumption that the Neolithic saw an overall cognitive revolution.